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The Parameter of Aspect presents a unified theory of aspect within Universal Grammar. It provides an unusual combination of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic approaches to a single domain, and gives detailed linguistic analyses of five languages with very different aspectual systems: English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Navajo and Russian. Extensive discussion of the linguistic evidence is complemented by a formal semantic treatment in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory, with an explicit procedure for computing aspectual meaning from syntactic surface structure. Among the theoretical innovations is a principled account of the interaction between viewpoint (perfective, imperfective) and situation type (state, event); a level of pragmatic analysis at which contrastive and inferred meanings are stated; a default analysis of sentences that are neither perfective nor imperfective in viewpoint. This second edition has been completely revised to include further development of the two-component theory, including new treatments of boundedness, dynamism and a general account of aspectual shifts. Syntactic and semantic tests are given for determining aspectual categories in all five languages.

"The book is well organized and easy to follow. In conclusion this work is an important contribution to the study of aspect. The first edition of the book became one of the basic works on aspect, cited by many and used as a textbook by some. I believe this edition will gain the same respect."
(Pragmatics & Cognition, 8:2 (2000)